Bay 12 Games Forum

Forging your own tools before you strike the earth is a great compression algorithm -- it trades a little dwarven labor up front for precious embark points -- but if we forgo compression and look at broader strategies like skill distributions, I think we'll probably see information that is more likely to be helpful to newcomers on the Wiki.  For example, I didn't realize woodcutting was such a waste of skill points, for example, and I've been playing since the 2D version.  (I can hear the heavy optimizers now: "you haven't been playing very hard!")

Of course there will always be aggressive min-maxing, and I think there ought to always be a place for it: DF is an operations researcher's dream-come-true, and so people who are attracted to that kind of challenge will love DF and optimize the ever-loving carp out of it.

I like to use the two most emotionally-stable dwarves in my starting seven for a Proficient Mason and (at least since the 40d versions) a designated Business Manager, because you'll always have excess stone and you'll always have business to manage... right up until you don't.  A carpenter is a good idea, and having him work quickly seems important, but maybe it's not as important as giving him a useful secondary skill that isn't moodable. 

My preferred skill layout (with moodable skills marked "m") is:

Manager - novice or no-mod skill level in several management duties (and probably doctor duties in 2010), occasionally I make this guy my novice mechanic
Mason - Proficient Mason (m), novice Building Designer, 4x mechanic
Farmer 1 - 5xGrower / 3xBrewer / 2xMiller
Farmer 2 - 5xGrower / 3xCook / 2xThresher
Carpenter - Proficient Carpenter (m), Proficient Siege Engineer
Miner 1 - Proficient Miner (m), Proficient Leatherworker
Miner 2 - Proficient Miner (m), Proficient Gem Setter (unlikely to trigger mood because mining advances faster)

I bring 6 picks and an axe and let everyone dig for the first season, and then set up farms and a masonry/mechanic area.  My initial loadout is 25 of each seed (for 5x5 plots), 41 or 51 of each booze (for extra barrels), 1 of each cheap meat (for the barrels), and a stack of turtles or cave lobster (for bones and shells).  I also try to bring a rope (for establishing a well early), some bauxite if it's available, and two dogs (for establishing a war dog breeding program).  The Gem Setting and Siege Engineering are there because the material cost of training is prohibitive: you waste a lot of your gems on basically vajazzling a masterpiece stone bureau, or you waste hundreds of logs on making inferior catapult parts that can't ever be improved and sell for basically nothing.

I'm sure my load-out will change for DF2010 - I can see gypsum gaining popularity for plaster casts, for example, and I think the "get a free barrel" hack may be a thing of the past.  I also suspect with the reworked economy, the heavy emphasis on developing a steel industry may go away.

Nothing cogent to add, but I had a ton of trouble finding this thread with the search, so I'm subscribing to get a look at your Mendelian and Mengelean escapades.

I saw a thread -- but can't find it using the search, even going after terms I know appear in the thread! -- that discussed the possibility of breeding an all-white race of cows from the largest most muscular cattle.  I noticed the previous thread's author had listed the butchery outputs from several cows that he bred, and I'd like to use this thread as a holding ground for people to post their results from slaughtering animals with any set of traits (size, fat, musculature) so we can begin to correlate those traits for the Wiki.

Just from looking at the preliminary results, my theory was that size created a baseline yield, musculature acted as a multiplier for the meat yield, and increasing fattiness appeared to decrease meat yield without appreciably boosting the fat yield. 

I'd also like to explore the results of cross-breeding:

• Do really big and really small animals yield one or the other, or can they produce something in between?
• Does an extraordinarily-muscled animal reduce fattiness (and vice versa?)
• If you breed light and dark animals together, can you get spotted animals, or just light and dark?
• If a single dark-colored ancestor is present in the first generation with 3 (or 7) light-colored ancestors, and only their dark-colored offspring are permitted to interbreed, can those offspring produce a light-colored progeny? (this gets into how much actual genetics is going on)

Hey Baughn, love the work you've done on the 40d# series.  I lead a team of SW developers by day, and I'm looking over the case studies in this thread... the reports are pretty inconsistent.  If a certain user was willing to run some number of test cases greater than 4 but less than (say) 32, what cases would be most helpful for you to look at?

I'll be trying out your DF_Accelerator code, but I figured I might as well generate useful test data while I'm at it.

You could use the design for a mist generator to create a perpetual magma mist in front of the catapult, and fire lignite rocks through a curtain of magma.  I don't think all of them would catch, but the ones that did would end up landing on-or-near the ones that didn't.  You could even fire some dummy rocks to determine the best location for a booze stockpile, and use this setup as a rhesus macaque trap.

>> A rhesus macaque has stolen dwarven wine!
>> Rhesus macaque has died in the heat (x24)

All three millable plants can be brewed into booze instead, if that's what you need, but you can't have both: each plant can either be milled into wheat or brewed into booze.  Longland flour, dwarven flour, and whip vine flour are all made at the mill from longland grass, cave wheat, and whip vines.  A miller can convert a stack of N whip vines into a stack of N whip vine flour, worth 25 each.  If prepared by a semi-skilled cook -- let's say he does a Fine job -- each one adds 75 to the price of each meal in a stack, and adds N to the total stack size.  The total value added over (say) plump helmet is going to be 23 dorfbucks times the quality modifier.

That's up to a few hundred extra dorfbucks per meal.  Millers are unskilled, and millstone quality isn't terribly important.  For a handful of logs, a mechanism, and a low-grade millstone you can make a wind-powered mill that will crank out as much flour as you can throw at it.  If you're making an infinite power generator anyway, go ahead and tack on a mill on the top floor of your reactor.

So a few minutes' work setting up stockpiles and product flow gets you another nice source of revenue and a contributor to your dwarves' happiness.  Since my forts generally get through the first five years selling expensive drive-thru food to elves and humans, I always have a mill set up pretty quickly. 

If you have a mill, you'll want to have plenty of bags around, though... and bags require either lots of leather or a farmer's workshop, a loom, and a clothier's workshop.  I suppose you could split your bags into cheap and expensive variants using stockpiles, and then use all the cheap leather bags for mill bags, but the real synergy between mills and the cloth industry is this: the cloth industry produces bags but uses dye, and creates valuable cloth as a side effect; the mill industry uses up bags and produces dye, and produces valuable food as a side effect.

It might be useful to set up an outdoor walkway that goes past the waterfall and leads to the dorms or some other critical stockpile - maybe even put your fortress entrance on one side, and delve down so everyone has to cross near/under the mist to get into your fort.  That way everyone coming and going gets a happy thought from the mist.